by Gill Hands
Marx thought unions would keep expanding and this would be helped by modern forms of communication like the railways.
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Insight
Marx was ahead of his time in understanding the importance of modern technology and communications to the revolutionary cause. Today the internet and mobile phones are vital tools for the organization of any anti-establishment group.
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In Marx’s time contact among groups could be made and eventually the numerous local struggles could be centralized to become a national struggle between the classes. Eventually, an international struggle would take place.
The proletariat needed to become better organized and stop any in-fighting between different factions. This would make them stronger and able to take advantage of divisions among the bourgeoisie. Eventually a revolution would occur, for only a revolution could overthrow a system that was spreading its tentacles all over the world.
The International Working Men’s Association
Until the formation of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864 there had been no real co-ordination between workers in the various capitalist economies that existed throughout the world. The First International, as it became known, was the first attempt to bring international workers together to fight a common cause. Any workers’ groups that had previously existed tended to be secretive because of the risk of reprisals from the bourgeois capitalist class, so they attracted mostly radical conspirators. It was also true, as Marx pointed out, that the majority of the workforce accepted their exploitation as being natural. For this reason the majority of workers did not even belong to workers’ associations in their own countries, let alone international ones.
Another barrier to international co-operation at this time was that there was little solidarity between citizens of the countries that made up Europe. For most of the Industrial Revolution, various countries within Europe had been at war with each other, or suffering civil war and revolution. Existing workers’ associations focused on local issues. For example, in Germany they had become active under the leadership of Lassalle but confined their protests to their own country. In France the revolution had made the government grudgingly tolerant of the workers; fear of another revolution, driven by worker dissatisfaction, led to trade associations being allowed. These were under strict government supervision and regulated by the police in case they got out of hand. It was a meeting of these French trade associations and British trade unionists that forged the first link in the chain that led to the formation of the International.
The Great Exhibition of Modern Industry in 1863 was a showcase for British capitalist endeavour and drew in visitors from around the world. Among these were French labour leaders who came in an official delegation sent by the French emperor, Napoleon III. They met up with English labour leaders from the London Trades’ Council to discuss tactics that could be used during strikes, the use of blackleg labour from abroad, wages, hours and pay. Following this meeting, they decided to form an association that would do more than just discuss the issues but would enable them to actively work together co-operatively on political and economic issues.
The first meeting took place in London in September 1864 and was chaired by Edward Beesly, a professor of Ancient History who was also a radical. Marx became involved because he was a well-known German émigré and activist. He was asked if he knew anyone to be a spokesman for the German workers and he recommended George Eccarius, a tailor whom he had assisted with the publication of articles on conditions in London tailoring shops. Marx attended the first meeting to support Eccarius but by the end of the evening he had been co-opted onto the committee.
It is often said by Marx’s critics that he was not concerned with the reality of workers’ lives and preferred to sit in his ivory tower writing, but his involvement with the International shows this is not the case. It is true he had a difficult and forceful personality and often fell out with his fellow members in the society, but he did work extremely hard to organize and support workers during his time at the International. This was in addition to his research and writing for Das Kapital and it brought him to the point of physical and mental exhaustion, even though it did not bring in any more money for his family.
Marx and Engels both became members of the International because it was a cause they believed in, but at the same time they realized that they were not workers themselves and hesitated to take office on the committee. However, when Marx saw the proposed constitution of the International, he decided to become more involved for he believed he could do a much better job!
He drew up the rules and principles and wrote the inaugural address which, after The Communist Manifesto, is one of the greatest appeals that he made to the workers. The constitution begins:
… the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule …
The inaugural address began with a survey of economic and social conditions since 1848, contrasting the lives of property owners with those of the workers. Marx likened capitalists to vampires who sucked the blood of children and sacrificed them in order to keep the economy going and described how working families starved in the midst of plenty. He wrote that although 1848 had been a year when revolution might have occurred throughout Europe, it had been thwarted, but that this meant the workers had since seen how they could work together as instruments of force. Since then, they had joined together to limit the length of the working day, but this was not enough. Co-operation would not be enough to stop the growth of the monopoly of capitalism and free the masses.
Marx finished with an appeal for the workers to realize that their vast numbers alone were not enough to make any difference, ‘numbers weigh in the balance only if united by combination and led by knowledge’. The address ended with the powerful words that had concluded The Communist Manifesto, ‘working men of all countries unite!’
The aims of the International were set out in the rules:
Establish close relations between workers in various countries and trades.
Collect relevant statistics.
Inform workers in one country of conditions, needs and plans of workers in another.
Discuss questions of common interest.
Co-ordinate simultaneous action in all countries in cases of international crisis.
Publish frequent reports.
The First International recruited many members and set up branches in Italy and Spain but it was eventually disbanded. One of the main problems was that workers from different countries wanted different things and came from different backgrounds. They did not even have a common aim, for although some of the members wanted revolution, some wanted to gain rights by peaceful means and they could not agree on how the campaign for workers’ rights should be conducted. On the whole, the French were mainly Utopian Socialists and disliked trade unions, and the majority of the British contingent were trade unionists who were not interested in revolution. Even workers from the same country could not agree on aims and objectives; for example, many of the French were followers of Proudhon but many were revolutionaries. The eventual crisis that led to the downfall of the International was a result of personal animosity between Marx and Bakunin, but was really inevitable given that it was the first organization of its kind and that patriotism is such a strong issue for many people. Possibly, it is an example of the internal contradictions that Marx was so fond of writing about.
Is revolution inevitable?
Marx developed his views on revolution throughout his lifetime but on the whole he was in favour of revolution, although he did not believe it would necessarily have to be violent. At the conference of the International he addressed these words to the government, ‘we will proceed against you by peaceful means where it is possible and with arms when i
t is necessary’.
The conclusion he drew from his dialectical study of society was that revolution was not only desirable but also inevitable because of the internal conflicts inherent in capitalism. According to Marx, these polar opposites could not exist together in a stable society; dialectical theory meant that the proletariat must overthrow the bourgeoisie.
‘The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggle’, he said in The Communist Manifesto. He believed that a better society could then be built, a society based on the principles of communism. A communist society could not be built straight after a revolution, but would develop over time, after initial stages of socialism.
Marx was not the first to believe that society should be improved; many of his ideas were developed from those of the Utopian Socialists such as Owen and Fourier. They had criticized the capitalist system and shown how inhumane and oppressive it was. They believed in a socialist society where there was common ownership of the means of production. Where Marx differed from them was in the choice of method that would bring about this society. The Utopians believed reason was the best way to bring about a change in the views of society. They set up model communities and factories where hours were regulated; workers were treated fairly and given access to education, good homes and nourishing food. They believed these examples of philanthropy would be enough to bring about change in society.
Marx agreed with the humanitarian changes which were made, but thought that good housing, medical care, education and wage reforms did not get to the root of the problem, which was the exploitation of one class by another. If the economic base of society is the real source of the conflicts within it, no amount of workers’ benefits will resolve the problem. The contradictions within the capitalist system will continue to accumulate. Change will only come about when workers take over factories, mines and banks by force: ‘Material force must be overthrown by material force’.
Another reason Marx believed in the inevitability of revolution was his view of the state. He was the first to realize that ‘the state’ is not an impartial body that works for the benefit of everybody in society. Most materialist philosophers, including Hegel, viewed the state as a part of the natural order that was necessary to the working of society. Marx believed the state exists to protect the ruling class and suppress those that produce wealth for them. For example, in feudal societies laws were made in favour of the land-owning classes. Trespassing and poaching were often punished severely, even by death. In a capitalist society laws are passed which curb the power of trade unions and the media is controlled by the rich, who can use it to attack anyone who upsets the status quo. These factors make it even more likely that revolution must take place against the vested interests in capitalism. The state will try to block any peaceful or non-confrontational changes that undermine its powers of suppression.
In his early years, Marx believed that revolution would:
begin in the industrialized capitalist countries of Europe such as Britain and Prussia
spread rapidly around the rest of the world because of the way in which countries had become economically dependent on each other.
However, he did amend some of his ideas later in his life, which is why he was not totally wrong in predicting the future, for the first communist revolution was in Russia, a country based on a peasant economy. It remained the only communist country for nearly 30 years. Not long before his death, he saw that perhaps a revolution in Russia might occur in conjunction with one in Europe and could succeed because there was already a system of common ownership of land in place, and at the time of the Russian Revolution industrialization was beginning to expand rapidly.
Marx was disappointed in his lifetime as the predicted revolution did not occur, despite a number of simultaneous strikes and uprisings that happened throughout Europe in 1848. He and Engels became very excited by the bourgeois revolution in Germany that year and predicted it would soon spread, but when this did not materialize he wondered if perhaps the time was not quite right. In later years he predicted that workers might have to go through at least 50 years of struggle before they could change their circumstances, and that this would be a long-term process.
Marx was always against revolutionary terror of the kind that had happened in France and thought it showed immaturity on the part of the participants. For this reason, he was against revolution taking place too soon, when people were not educated enough to take part properly in the process of change.
As a philosopher, Marx saw benefits to the individual from revolution: ‘In a revolution to change society men change themselves’. This is because he believed that people were not really free when they were subject to forces they couldn’t understand. He hoped his writings would help them to realize these forces existed and that they were the products of the human mind. The human mind had created the economy and social structure that oppressed them, not a god or universal mind. When people realized this they would be free to take responsibility for their own actions and change both themselves and the world.
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THINGS TO REMEMBER
Marx spent years refining his theories on the dialectical view of history and the development of the economy.
He believed that society was always dominated by a ruling elite that controlled the means of production and the surplus products of the workers.
He saw the history of society as a series of dialectical conflicts. Societies were continually destroyed by internal contradictions and then replaced.
The capitalist system was the latest form of exploitation in a series of oppressive rules through history.
The state was not an independent body but a tool that capitalists used to oppress the workers.
Because the proletariat and bourgeoisie could not exist together in a stable society, revolution would be inevitable.
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7
Further Marxist thought
In this chapter you will learn:
what Marx believed might happen after the revolution
about the dictatorship of the proletariat
how Marx and Engels thought a communist society might work
Marx’s views on religion, women’s rights and the family, art and culture, freedom and the individual.
Although Marx wrote a great deal about the way in which the relationship between society and the economy had developed throughout history, he did not write much about how these would develop after the revolution that he had predicted. He believed a classless communist society would be the result of the revolution, but he did not really define how this society might be run. This is hardly surprising as his view of the world was a materialist one; anything that might happen in the future was a supposition and could not be examined. As he believed that the structure of society was based on the economic factors existing at the time, he did not think it possible to predict in advance any details of what that structure would be like. He made a few predictions about what might happen and some of these were influenced by the ideas of the Utopian Socialists and the French communists, although he did not agree with a lot of their more Romantic ideals.
He did not write in detail about the structure of any future communist society, but he thought deeply about the relationships between people within that society. In his writing he looked at the world in a new way and shed new light on the relationships between individuals and the society they lived in. His ideas were considered extremely radical in their day but today we take many of them for granted in Western society; for example, equal rights for men, women and children.
After the revolution
Marx did not write a great deal about the form that society would take after the revolution, or how it would be organized. He believed that society would have to become communist in the long term, but there would have to be a transitional phase before this could occur. At first, society would be ‘stamped with the birthmarks’ of the past capitalist society it had emerged from, l
ike a child from the womb. Marx did not believe that it would be possible to go directly from a capitalist society to a communist one, there would have to be an intermediate stage between the two known as socialism. Socialism in the Marxist sense is just a descriptive word for the intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. Today the word socialism has become a much less easily defined term, referring to any system where there is state control, planning and ownership of the means of production. There is also some element of social care for the sick, children, the elderly and those in extreme poverty. (Many would argue that those countries that declare themselves to be communist states are actually only at the state of socialism.)
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Insight
It is important that when you read anything on socialism that you understand how the author defines the term in the text.
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Under socialism there would be a dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx wrote about this in “The Class Struggles in France” written for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue in 1850. Here he wrote that, ‘the class dictatorship of the proletariat would be a necessary stage for the “abolition of class distinctions generally”’. He also wrote in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, ‘Between capitalist and the communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.’